The Transparency Tax: Discouraging Firm Ownership via Tax Havens

Jakob Brounstein, Pierre Bachas and Alex Bajaña

No 11493, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: Tax havens weaken tax enforcement by obscuring firm ownership and facilitating offshore evasion. This paper studies a reform in Ecuador that imposed a corporate tax surcharge on firms with owners in tax havens, using a newly available ownership registry. Comparing haven-owned firms to other foreign-owned firms, the analysis finds that the reform reduced haven ownership by 12 percentage points, largely through disclosure of non-haven individual owners. Exposed firms reduced transactions with tax havens and increased corporate tax payments, with no detectable effects on investment or firm size. The results suggest that ownership transparency can meaningfully improve tax compliance at limited efficiency cost, even through unilateral action.

Date: 2026-10-30
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/0992101 ... 65b-ddf76bc7aa2f.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:11493

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().